Steve Hindy’s path from the Middle East to Brooklyn yeast
On 'Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,' the Brooklyn Brewery founder charts his unlikely career and challenging year.
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Brooklyn Brewery founder Steve Hindy took an unlikely route to becoming a beer baron: He started out as a Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press in the early 1980s.
He covered the hostage crisis in Iran and the Iran-Iraq War. He was kidnapped in Lebanon (“I’m sure they wish they had killed me,” he says today), and was seated behind Egyptian President Anwar Sadat when Sadat was assassinated in Cairo in 1981.
Today Hindy is the twelfth largest exporter of American style craft beer. He is also today’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” In a wide ranging conversation we find out how he got from point A to point beer, which was inspired in part by sampling illicit home-brew in Egypt.
We talk about how the Brooklyn landscape specifically, and the beer business in general, has evolved over the last 30 years. He’ll describe how the coronavirus pandemic has affected his business—”we’re going to get through this,” he says, “not without difficulty”—and get into the incursion of hard seltzer (he’s not a fan) into the beer space.
The conversation has cameos from legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser and legendary columnist Pete Hamill. And we get a visit from some unsavory wise guys who attempted to halt the construction of the Brooklyn Brewery in the 90s.
